California State University Monterey Bay and Burroughs High School 2008 graduate Emily Roncase was awarded a $90,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

The fellowship is awarded to 2,000 students across the nation, most of which go to graduate students. Roncase is one of 595 undergraduates in the United States to receive the award.

“The fellowship gives me $90,000 to fund the first three years of my graduate research, with a stipend of $30,000 each year,” she said in an email.

She will start a graduate program at The Scripps Research Institute this August and will use the funding for that.

“It is very exciting,” Roncase said.

To apply for this fellowship, she had to complete three essays. One is a personal statement describing their motivations for wanting to attend graduate school and how they have contributed to their scientific discipline and the broader community. The second was a previous research essay highlighting their past research experiences, and the third a proposed research statement describing the research they want to conduct in graduate school.

“For this application, I modeled my proposed research statement on the research I conducted at the University of Illinois at Chicago last summer,” she said. “In the ribosome structure and function lab of Dr. Alexander Mankin, I studied the molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.”

Roncase said she investigated the effects of the antibiotic chloramphenicol on protein synthesis and the induction of chloramphenicol resistance genes in bacteria.

“The broader implications of my research are twofold,” said Roncase. “It directly impacts drug discovery that can lead to the rational design of superior protein synthesis inhibitors, and it benefits basic biology by helping clarify the mode of action of antibiotics like chloramphenicol.”